Sunday, March 29, 2009

Cal-con: My first convention

This weekend was my first gaming convention. I really enjoyed myself. Here are a couple of pictures.This is from the Tunnels & Trolls game I played on Friday afternoon. The GM is on the left and the other four players were a family. The young lad across the way was enjoying his first ever RPG. It was a lighthearted game and a lot of fun.This picture is the group in my OD&D game on Saturday. We played through a slightly modified version of the Haunted Keep from Dragonsfoot. The guy on the right in the blue shirt was suppose to be DMing a 3.5 game that was cancelled so I waved him over and he decided to sit in. The gentleman next to him is K-Slacker and is in my Northern Marches campaign. It was the first OD&D experienced for all of the players. The session ended with four of the players dead and one charmed with about 15 minutes left if the allotted time. Everyone seemed to have fun.

I was scheduled to run another old school game this morning but Calgary awoke toI went over to the hotel where convention was being held and you could tell that between it being the morning of the last day and the weather it was noticeably quieter. I spoke with the guy in charge of roleplaying games and he told me that attendance during the first morning session was down over 50%. He mentioned that my table was sold out but after waiting for a half-hour past the starting time no-one had showed up.

One thing I noticed, and I might have been extra sensitive to this since I was the only guy running old D&D, most of the talk I heard at tables running 3.5 or 4E was about which square to move to.

Sounds like you had a good time...even though mother nature, and your time slot, conspired against you on the last day.

I run my LL game the same way. I've got tons of published (mostly FightOn and Knock Spell) adventures sprinkled throughout my wilderness. I find that having unrelated dungeons all over the place is fun, in that it's always a challenge to figure out how they're going to stumble across the clue to the next setting.